Menakem: “… then that is in some way gonna make it so we can all sing kumbaya together.” And this is why I don’t — when I do my workshops and I do my experiences, I do not slam white bodies and bodies of culture together, because it is unsafe. And we all know it.

Sewell, CheyOnna. "Artist Resmaa Menakem launches new book, gallery exhibit and album to inspire action on racial justice". Twin Cities Daily Planet . Retrieved 2020-11-26. Menakem: [ laughs] So what happened was, I asked one question. I said, “How many people in here believe in diversity?” Everybody shot their hands up. Boom. Everybody. I said, “Answer this one next question.” And I said, “Don’t bring your hands down. Answer this question. Diverse from what?” The journey continues making it’s way to Salvador, Brazil on Sept. 1 and Sept. 2 and weaves its way to Accra, Ghana on Dec. 16 and Dec. 17. If I was tasked with summing up the book in one sentence, I would borrow from Ta-Nehisi Coates, quoted at the beginning of the book:

Ever since hearing Resmaa Menakem in conversation with Krista Tippett for her *on being* podcast (twice!), I knew I had to read this book. Menakem proposes that we'll not achieve racial healing and cultural change with solely cognitive understandings or political/activist strategy. It is through achieving a "settling" within our bodies that we can personally and collectively heal/break the cycle of generational trauma. And this has SO MANY implications for teaching; teachers CAN be healers and CAN create classroom culture that is safe, healthy, and inclusive. I've studied racism and been part of anti-racism work for over 25 years, and I have to say, this book is one of the most valuable pieces of work on the topic that I've read. Menakem's teachings don't replace or supplant other racial liberation tactics or philosophies, but instead give us a fresh way to expand how we understand the lived racial experience we ALL have. It gives us another road into this work, a road that seems essential to travel, even as we commit and recommit ourselves to multiple additional types of racial liberation work. Plus, Menakem's writing style is accessible, clear and blunt - just what this topic needs. Menakem: Diversity, equity, and inclusion. And even when you say it, everybody kind of like, their eyes get dreamy. It’s like, “Oh, diversity, equity, inclusion.” But if you don’t define what that means, it can mean “Taco Tuesday.” It can mean “Collard Green Wednesday.” It can be anything that’s kind of cursory. So one of the questions that I asked, when I went to this thing and they asked me to come — “Yes, we really want you to be here, and —” that was my white voice — “We really want you to come here and do this thing …” [ laughs] A calm, settled body is the foundation for health, for healing, for helping others, and for changing the world."

Tippett: Well, one thing that you say — that there’s a lot of problems with the way progressives approach all this, well-meaningly, and one of them is that rather than creating culture, they create strategy — which, again, is a head move; it’s a cognitive move. Tippett: It’s amazing. If I ask you, through this life you’ve led and this knowledge you’ve taken in and that you teach people, how would you start to answer the question about how your sense of — your sense of what it means to be human, how that is evolving, how you’d start to think that through right now? Each person needs to metabolize their trauma, to work through it and out of it with their bodies, not just with their conscious thinking mind. Trauma healing needs to be done slowly, perceiving the body’s reactions, learning to calm or settle. Menakem: I think what it means to be human is to realize that we’re ever-emerging and that that — that we are not machines. We are not flesh machines. We are not robots. We come from and are part of Creation, and that that cannot just be something we talk about when we go to a yoga retreat — that it has to be a lived, emergent ethos and that — one of my ancestors, Dr. King, talked about how when people who love peace have to organize as well as people who love war. And for me, what that means is that it’s about work. It’s about action. It’s about doing. It’s about pausing. It’s about allowing — the reason why we want to heal the trauma of racialization is that it thwarts the emergence. So let’s not do that. Let’s condition and create cultures that will allow that emergence to reign supreme so that the intrinsic value can supersede the structural value. entirely intellect-oriented exercises with "and how does your body feel?" added on at the end, which isn't actual body work;

undoing white-body supremacy is first and foremost a somatic endeavor. the cognitive/thinking parts will flow second (because the lizard brain, the part tied to our vegus nerve, is both faster than cognition AND the vegus nerve can override cognition). Krista Tippett, host: Across the past year, and now as the murder trial of Derek Chauvin unfolds, with Minneapolis in fresh pain and turmoil, I return again and again to the grounding insights of Resmaa Menakem. He is a Minneapolis-based therapist and trauma specialist who activates the wisdom of elders, and very new science, about how all of us carry in our bodies the history and traumas behind everything we collapse into the word “race.” We offer up Resmaa’s intelligence anew on changing ourselves at a cellular level — practices towards the transformed reality I believe most of us long to inhabit. The depth of the embodiment work here is a disappointment, rarely exploring further than insights like 'antiracist leaders should find a signature garment to wear to inspire solidarity'. unexpected and untagged visualizations of stressful or traumatic situations, which is a poor decision for a book that purports to work respectfully with trauma;

Menakem: So the other thing that I say is that when people talk about the 13 colonies, the 13 colonies were filled with colonized white people. So what ends up happening is that when you have that level of brutality for all that time, and then right after the Bacon Rebellion is the first time you start to see, in law, “white” persons — not landowners, not merchants, “white” persons …Tippett: And we know the narrative — they fled. They fled. We never think, these were traumatized people. by Ellen Hoffenberg-Serfaty https://journal.workthatreconnects.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/WhiteBodyElderMeets.mp3 Menakem: Well, I don’t say “bodies of color” anymore, because what I’m trying to do is, I’m trying to reclaim the idea that I’m actually a human. Fifth, he introduces new terms such as “dirty and clean pain” and “the soul nerve” and while it’s not necessarily bad, I felt it was completely useless and seemed like he was trying to hard to make up something new for some reason.